1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a face recognition apparatus for recognizing moving people using a set of face images acquired from a plurality of cameras and a face recognition method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to recognize individuals from a moving people by a plurality of cameras, a method of tracking faces from a video sequence and selecting a best-shot face image from acquired faces for the respective persons is proposed in Japanese Patent Application Kokai No. 2005-227957.
In this method, conditions of the face image such as the size, pose, and lighting conditions are estimated in order to select a best-shot face image.
In the above-describe method, a best-shot face image often cannot be obtained from a single camera because of facial pose caused by people moving freely. Furthermore, the above-describe method needs to consider difficult problems such as a state transition between detecting and tracking faces. For face tracking, occlusion is difficult problems. In addition, when the frame rate of cameras is low, tracking faces is often failed.
Therefore, the present invention provides a face recognition apparatus which recognizes a plurality of persons acquired by a plurality of cameras without selecting face images, and a face recognition method.